A college student earning $10K on her fashion lines and startup news trumping political propaganda in Kenya; social media isn’t just selfies - it’s ‘$$$elfies’

Fatima Babakura is the 21 year old founder of Nigerian heritage, and creative director of Timabee, based in Canada. Here’s how she started earning 10,000 dollars on Instagram:

“I’m the founder of a fashion accessory brand. It started as a hobby and it turned into a business. It has been a successful journey so far. What social media has done for me and my business has been amazing. I started out with no money when I was in grade 10 except for the 150 dollars in savings. I lost it right away on the business so I realized early on that to have money, I had to make money. What I did was take to Instagram. I took a picture of a handbag I had made and put it up there. People loved it and started ordering it. Now four years down the road, we put out two collections of accessories a year. On average if the collection is successful we make a round a 10,000 dollars, and I’m still in my final year of college.”

“Your social media should be about personal branding and that may involve sacrifice and dedication from you so that you have created an online presence that you will be proud to call yours. Your brand or what you stand for is best defined as what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

Brittany Garth and Vaneese Johnson are both international life coaches from USA of African heritage and Brittany has been voted one of the top 50 online social media influencers in the US. They said:

“Your digital footprint must stand for something meaningful. We can only learn and enrich our lives and businesses when our online ‘friends and contacts’ are people we truly care about, inspire us and are people we would like to be associate with even in the real world.”

“I work with women entrepreneurs to inspire and encourage them especially to use social and digital marketing skills so that they can get their businesses online. Because with social media there’s so much that can be achieved. I’m a proud African, from a continent that is rising. I also come from a country whose capital city was nominated number 1 in the world for innovation.

People see social media as a negative influence in our lives and more used for political propaganda. I’m here to tell you today that your life and your business can be enriched using social media. Not every woman will have the means to travel all the way to Delhi to be a part of forums like this. However with the use of the social media you can. Our team from Kenya consisting of young Kenyans tweeted about our company’s presence at WEF 2017, using the hashtag, “#WEF2017”. The result was astounding. On Day 1 alone, we had generated 4 million likes or mentions about the WEF. So you see we can use social media to spread positive messages like that of WEF we are sharing in this room in real time.”